Beauty and the Beast Review!
After two months in the theater Beauty and the Beast is still kicking butt at the box office. Families are going to see it numerous times, friends are bringing their friends with them, and overall this movie just feels like a bonding experience that people love to have when visiting the theater. While Disney has gotten better at their animated to live-action movies, with Jungle Book being a huge high-light of last year, I feel like Beauty and the Beast shows audiences how great the potential of these films can be, and how these films can suffer from remaking something already classic.
All in all I will say that this live-action retelling of Disney's Beauty and the Beast is a great film. It added new elements that worked wonderfully in the film's favor, while also keeping elements too similar to its predecessor. A lot of people will have fun with this film, and if you haven't seen the animated film in a few years you surely will feel that warm coating called nostalgia. That's not bad, but it does hide the elephant in the room when it comes to this interpretation of a literary classic.
Every actor, and actress, is wonderful in this film. You can tell that everyone was having fun and giving it their all. Emma Watson was an interesting choice to play Belle, and I felt that she was able to bring something new to Belle even though her character was tweaked. Similarly with Dan Stevens who played the Beast; I thought his interpretation was really good and refreshing, but both characters are different when compared to their animated selves. Some people will like this, while others may complain that they got the characters wrong.
It's almost impossible to talk about this film without comparing it to the animated classic. For instance, in the animated version Belle is a strong and outspoken woman who keeps her promises. In the live-action version, Belle is a woman looking for adventure in her life that will do whatever she can to get out of a bad situation, even if that means breaking the promise to the Beast. Small changes like that bugged me, because they started to add up and really change who this Belle is. Whenever Belle had to go through story beats from the animated film it felt wrong, almost as if this Belle wouldn't do that. The same happened with the Beast.
When I was watching this movie the Beast felt more refined and less childish, as he should be. Instead of the animated film, where he changed when he was younger, the prince turned into the Beast when he was already an adult. As a kid who had to live with being rejected and an outsider it makes sense for him to have anger issues, but once again when that story beat is brought up in the live-action version it felt out of place. We only hear about his anger problem from Cogsworth and Lumiere. The film shows his "anger" maybe twice before he and Belle start bonding. When they do start bonding he shows her his more educated side, and how he's more of an intellect than his animated predecessor. This new detail, one that would make sense when bonding with the only bookworm, is great, but it wouldn't make sense for him to have anger issues, nor for him to act like a beast without table etiquette. Again, he just showed Belle that he was an intellectual. In his stance, he's hunched over from being depressed, but he's mostly standing up straight like a regular person, not a beast. In the animated film he's constantly on all fours, more in tune with being an animal than human, so his feasting without a spoon would make sense. When he's slurping his food, in the live-action film, it felt out of character. These small changes make the scenes that are faithful to the animated feature feel out of place.
If they went away from the classic scenes in Belle and Beast's "love montage" I think it would have been a stronger showcase of these two characters coming together. Those scenes perfectly emulated who these characters were, but because the live-action started to change who they were it made those faithful scenes feel awkward, or out of place. Keeping those scenes in actually made me think that Disney was too scared to go too far off the familiarity trail, and that's disappointing since they did such a wonderful job with the side-characters.
Lumiere, Cogsworth, and the rest of the furniture were the biggest parts of the film that I thought I'd hate. I didn't like their designs, and I questioned the actors doing their voices when their concepts were released, but after watching the movie I found myself thinking that they were the best. They still retained their characters from the original film, but the writers were able to give them depth that wasn't in the animated feature. These characters are suffering just as much as the Beast, and I was starting to find myself feel more emotional towards them. Especially at the end, there's a scene where something happens to all of them that gets me teary eyed every time. Conversely, I feel like so much attention was made to make these characters worth having in the film that it side tracked the writers when it came to Belle's and Beast's relationship.
Other surprises I found from the film came out of Gaston, LaFou and Belle's father. Again, these characters have been tweaked and reworked to fit into this live-action world, and for most of it I really loved these characters. The father wasn't just a bumbling fool. He was smart, and probably one of the more successful people in the village, and because of this the film was able to slowly make Gaston more sinister by turning a serious man into a bumbling fool. Gaston himself is really fun to watch, and you can tell that Luke Evans is having the time of his life with the character. He's the most similar to his animated counterpart, but again slight differences were made. Luke Evans isn't jacked, and like most of the film he fits into what a real Gaston would be like. However, small moments like his singing scene in the bar where he's talking about how buff he is and eating all those eggs...it doesn't exactly fit with Evans' body type. LaFou was a fun character, and probably the most different from his animated compadre, because while he was only meant for comedic relief in the animated feature, he's a more serious character in this interpretation. Actually, he plays Gaston's Jiminy Cricket and the film sets up for this really cool confrontation with him and Gaston, and like other parts from the film it felt like they chickened out.
A prime example of being too faithful in this film is the castle raid scene. The angry mob busts open the doors, and suddenly they're at war with the furniture. In the animated feature it was funny, brought great humor, and worked in its cartoony world, however, it does not work in live-action. The music and editing tried to make it whimsical, but all I could think of were the poor men being mauled by furniture. People were losing their teeth, I'm sure a couple died, but the mob was being seriously hurt and that type of comedy doesn't work in a serious toned movie as this remake, making the scene feel completely out of place.
The best parts of Beauty and the Beast, for fans of the original, are arguably the songs. "Tale as old as Time," "Be Our Guest," and many others are iconic. They're boisterous, fun, and always a second away from making you have a great time. Since the live-action rendition is longer Disney added a few extra, new, songs to their classic catalog. For the most part they're alright, although their song "Evermore" is my new favorite song. That song is amazing, although it is oddly placed. The Beast sings this song when Belle leaves to rescue her father, but while the Beast is singing this heartbreaking, yet slightly hopeful, song the music starts to swell and trumpets are added, making the ending of the some almost heroic even though the scene on screen is the Beast slipping into depression. It's definitely oddly placed. When it comes to the classic songs I felt that they were not as boisterous as they could have been, and not as fun as the originals. You'll still have a good time with them, but they just don't compare.
Overall, Beauty and the Beast is a well made film, a great one in fact, that I enjoyed the heck out of, but their additions to characters didn't always match up to the classic story, and at times it felt like the two interpretations were fighting each other on screen. If the film wasn't as loyal to the original one, and had more room to stretch its legs and go outside the box even a step it would have been a more solid movie. The music is good, and the added songs aren't terrible. Luke Evans has a powerful voice when he gets to belt it out, and Dan Stevens has a fascinatingly somber voice that's refreshing for a movie like this. This movie is beyond perfect, but I feel like it's a good addition to Disney's growing live-action remakes. It was able to bring something new to the table by expanding the side-characters, to the point where I liked them more than the human characters. In fact, my favorite character in this whole film was the Piano. The film stays too faithful for its own good at points, making characters, or scenes in general, stick out like a sore thumb. But at the end of the day I really loved all the different things this film was trying to do, and I come out every time with a smile on my face and satisfaction in my heart.
B+
